Jaime Vegas, celebrity spiritualist, has the chance for
her big break. A cheesy TV show in Hollywood, raising dead celebrities
cumulating in that cheesiest of the cheesy – Marilyn Monroe. The problem is,
Jaime isn’t just a spiritualist, she’s a necromancer. She can actually see and
communicate with ghosts. This gives her an amazing advantage with some
excellent credibility when she does get through to real dead celebrities, but
is somewhat more difficult when you have hanging men over the breakfast table.
And worst still when there’s some unknown, impossible ghosts haunting the garden. Ghosts that may not be there at all – but maybe a source of the Necromancer’s worst fear, losing touch with reality altogether.
Tracking down these faded ghosts proves no easy matter,
as no-one in the magical community – down to the very darkest of dark practitioners
and even the demons themselves, know of any spell that can do this. It’s a path
that leads them down the dangerous and unknown paths of supposedly impossible
human magic.
And to complicate things, it turns out the TV show is actually a reality show filming her every move, and she’s trying to pursue her much wanted relationship with Jeremy, the werewolf Alpha, now she’s finally got him alone.
The story and the world building mesh so well in this
plot, especially with Jaime’s life. It has some original features – Big Brother
Spiritualist cracked me up – and an intriguing mystery – what can make a thin,
faded ghost? The question leads them to many, realistic places, each of which
shows us some more of the world. We catch up with Paige, Lucas and Savannah (I
always like to see the state of previous protagonists), the methods of dark
practitioners, Hope and her mission to keep the supernatural quite by making it
look ridiculous in the tabloids
And we get to see Jaime’s daily life as a Necromancer – what it means, what a nuisance ghosts can be, how heart breaking it can be to be unable to help and how frustrating it is to have
The new thread of human magic, humans seeking supernatural power, theories about latent supernatural blood is also an interesting new thread that adds texture to the world, especially when contrasted with the supernaturals and their immortality experiences – the extremes people go to for the unobtainable.
